Re: Installer UI advices

[M. Uli Kusterer]

At 9:20 Uhr -0600 14.03.2005, Jesse Ross wrote:
> Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, or maybe this is impossible
> because of different underlying OS's, or maybe there is an easier way, but
> can we locate the files we need to link to, get their inode, and use that
> as a reference? That way we could move the file around and the links
> wouldn't break.

 inodes only work on the same drive, IIRC. So you'd have to come with 
some special file-referencing technology (like Apple's aliases) that 
encodes some sort or drive-ID, inode ID etc. And AFAIK, inodes are 
specific to the Linux file system, or at least there seem to be some 
file systems that don't have inodes.

 Finally, most OSs barely support symlinks (e.g. Windows only added 
those with NT, and from what I heard it's a huge problem because 
people still want to install GNUstep on pre-NT filesystems).

 If we went out and invented our own flavor of symlink, all OSs on 
which GNUstep runs would have to support them. Okay, all OSs on which 
we want to support these installers. I guess on Linux/Unix you could 
really just create a daemon that scans certain special folders and 
then loads them manually, and then apps would just copy their 
"GS-Symlinks" there. But that would essentially be the same as just 
scanning all applications when they are first launched and looking in 
their bundle folders for the components to load.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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